Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if he will make it his policy to support the mandatory use of WHO COVID Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) by including working with the C-TAP as a condition of receiving UK public funding to support with research into covid-19 medical technologies.

We agree that the world urgently needs access to safe, effective, quality and affordable medicines and other health technologies to enable an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As details of the COVID-19 technology access pool (C-TAP) emerge from the World Health Organisation, we will assess if C-TAP could add value to existing wider innovation and access infrastructure, such as the Medicines Patent Pool, which we helped set up ten years ago.